The African Journalist: Facing the Challenge of Democracy and Incipient Tyranny

By

Nduka Uzuakpundu  

Most of Africa’s major aid donors and development partners are now demanding a new culture of leadership and government. Such financial institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and leading industrialised countries making up the G-8 – Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States say, with a touch of self-righteousness, that African states should strive hard to meet the new Millennium Goals as set by the United Nations, as some measure of the continent catching up with the rest of the developed world. They are also insisting on what – over the years – has become a sweeping, if, in some instances, vaguely defined term: good governance. It is probably a term that is less understood by most African policy-makers, to the extent that good governance not only irritates them, for it tends to remind them of the need to shun, if anything, corruption and ineptitude in public office. The concept of good governance is a like a post-Cold War burden for African leaders. It is one of the topmost and compelling conditionalities that they may have to satisfy, if they are to benefit from the financial assistance of the Bretton Woods institutions and the developed countries. It is being demanded of African governments as a reminder of a changing world: the rich countries would no longer dole out aid or grant loans to support dictatorial or anti-democratic regimes – as was the ignoble and conspiratorial fashion of the Cold War years. It is saying, in effect, that the international system has, since the transmogrification of the Soviet Union, changed; and that the world could be a lot better a place than it was before December 24, 1991, with a religious adherence to the fine tenets of democracy and respect for the rule of law.

Perhaps, such back-breaking leaning on African governments would seem to have effected some healthy changes. The Blair Commission for Africa (CFA) noted in its report – “Our Common Interest” – that there is a promising culture of democracy that is fast taking roots in the continent; with 32 democratically-elected governments today, as opposed to just three when the Cold War was still at its peak in the early ’70s. It is a trend – in consonance with good governance – in which some informed hope and capital ought to be invested by, in one instance, writing off the debt owed by some African states – if only to spur others, which are desirous of debt relief, but have been left out of the current list of 14 pioneering beneficiaries, to meet their Northern creditors halfway. Through good governance, it is still being hoped, there might come a time, soon, when Africa will pride itself as the continent with the largest number of democracies! Still, the idea of good governance said Dr. Gilbert Keith Bluwey, professor of politics and international relations at the Legon Centre for International Affairs (LECIA), Accra, Ghana, is “a system of rule through representative institutions, which ensure transparency, accountability, fair allocation of resources and just apportionment of punishment and reward. It also includes respect for human rights.” He told African media practitioners at a “UCIP Pan African Refresher Programme on Journalism In Africa: Achievements, Challenges and Scope Enhancing the Impact of the Communication and Information for Sustainable Development”, that they owed it as a duty to preserve good governance in the continent against the widespread tendency of African politicians to pervert decency and humanitarian principles of governance. In addition, it is the task of the African journalist, today, to thwart the designs of African despots to turn their republics into dynasties and themselves as chieftains and their offspring as permanent successors to power. This was one of the many issues alluded to by another speaker at the seminar – Dr Yao Graham, the publisher of Public Agenda and skipper of Third World Network – a non-governmental organisation. Addressing the topic: “Global Economy and Cancellation of Africa’s Debt: Benefits and Implications,” Graham noted that the role of the African journalist, as one of the many unsung heroes of the continent’s rejuvenated civil societies in the fight against despotism and an active player in democratic renaissance, related to how much political space there was likely to be in an era of debt relief and conditionalities that tended to leave political development to just seasonal, if routine process of voting, so that, in-between, the authoritarian state takes over the business of government. The point Graham made was that widening the political space is not the routine of government; it requires the active participation of civil society and the citizenry. Such a process of many constructively vociferous voices would make it impossible for any individual in power to want to make his village the national capital. There were all kinds of perversion – corruption, for instance, Graham noted, going on in all the tiers of government and public corporations, civil service. “In fact, wherever there is power,” Graham observed, “you find these accretion of abuse and perversion,” which remains a challenge for the African journalist.

It is a challenge that has a persuasive moral ring to it in that, said Graham, in spite of the republican constitutions adopted by most African states – which implies that sovereignty lies with the people – “the way power is organised is such that we are treated like subjects, who get served at the mercy of the sovereign. The culture of changing that – that the republican constitution is run almost flawlessly, in tune with the spirit of the rule of law that courses through it – and ensuring that elections are based on issues, rather patronage, is a challenge for the media.” One glaring example was the recent case of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who took a plane belonging to the Ugandan Airlines with himself and his daughter only on board to give birth in Europe, because he did not trust the doctors at the teaching hospital in Kampala. As a leader, who cannot trust the doctors in his country to see to a safe delivery by his pregnant daughter, it ought to be the time step aside.

For the African journalist, the issues raised by both Bluwey and Graham were mainly of class leadership around which – as civil societies in Africa have seen quite a glut of them, since the late ’70s, with their attendant predilection for ineptitude and corruption – irresponsible personality cults are built. They make a case for a proactive involvement of the media in Africa in the process of sustainable human development. Both Bluwey and Graham, in their different papers, met halfway in their allusion to the poor and unproductive leadership and political institutions in such countries like the Republic of Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo: two African countries that have set world records in seeing power devolving, by default – default that reads more like an indictment of a failed or an uncritical civil society – uncritical, possibly because the tyranny that the palace has come to symbolise an edifice tenanted a crown that no longer hearkens to the entreaties of its assumed subjects, and for which it has removed itself from the aspirations of the voters and tax-payers – from, say, Kabila the Father to Kabila the Son.

Where civil society would seem to have been acquiescent in the unconstitutionality that, initially, was the case in the Republic of Togo, there was the influential protest voice of Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, which insisted that the post-Eyadema operatives of the Togolese state must do the right thing: go through a multi-party elections, by which the political space has to be opened up generously to accommodate the long isolated, if repressed, opposition. As Bluwey noted, the Obasanjo intervention to the rectification of the unconstitutionality in the post-Eyadema Republic of Togo – alongside the flooding backing it received from the West African sub-region, Addis Ababa, Brussels, New York and Washington, was towing the line of the African Union , which had shown the way; with the abhorrence of coups and unconstitutional governments and Peer Review Mechanism under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. More than that, it is in recognition of the need for a universal solidarity in support of the African journalist in the discharge of his duty as a champion of democracy and freedom.

As Bluwey put it: “Given the erratic, almost unpredictable manner of behaviour of contemporary African politicians, . . . the individual African journalist and the single national union of journalists cannot hope to hold sway in the defence of human rights and good governance. You, therefore, need regional, continental and even world-wide solidarity; common action against dictators and bad governance.” A first step towards that end could be each African national journalist associations forging a conscious and virile alliance with the local trade union, the student movement, the bar association and the university teachers’ union for joint action nationally, regionally and continent-wide, to protest against any abuse of power – perhaps a la Amnesty International – anywhere in Africa. This position seems to imply that, as is the fashion in the post-Cold War era, when the international community cries out in the event of flagitious abuse of human rights, any attempt by the agents of the state or their associates, individual or corporate bodies or institutions to trample on the freedom of the journalist to perform his or her duty should be frowned upon – and thrown back by what one writer has called “global alliance of democracies.” This much is an admission of the leading function of the pen – as a metaphor for a disinterested ventilation of society – in a democratic milieu, such that it is able to provoke critical thinking on public policy, promote popular control over public decision-making and ensure broad direction of official action. The case for a revivification of the age-long free mason of the press, as suggested by Bluwey and Graham, chimed of nostalgia – as they both recalled the constructive roles that African journalists played in the struggle for independence by African states from colonial rule in the second half of the 20th Century, and just how all manner of politicians – civilian and military – had, in an unrelieved expression of ingratitude, tended, brazenly, to muzzle the press via as obnoxious laws as Decree. No.4 of 1984 promulgated by the Buhari regime in Nigeria to punish journalists for publishing truths that embarrass or ridicule any public officer. Bluwey posited that in an age of African democratic renaissance and re-invention of the continent’s civil societies, “when an individual journalist is jailed or is assassinated – as is the case in Mozambique and Burkina Faso, where journalists investigating corruption have been felled in circumstances that tended to suggest foul play by the state or its operatives – or slapped in the face by the First Lady or has his paper, radio or television station closed – probably as in Ghana and Kenya – you must be able to move spontaneously with a common response national, regionally and continentally.” * Nduka Uzuakpundu is a journalist on the Foreign Affairs desk of the VANGUARD in Lagos, Nigeria.